Search Results: carbon emissions

The Government's Green Paper has heated debate about climate change. The debate requires a moral framework that emphasises solidarity and responsibility. We must measure our response by the needs of allhuman beings and of the world.

Prepare for a lot of powerfully funded special interest lobbying against the Garnaut Report when it is issued next week, particularly from the coal industry. Those inconvenienced by change
will always shout louder than the majority who stand to benefit from it.

It seemed a last minute reprieve for tropical forests could emerge at the UN climate change meeting in Bali. Because 20% of greenhouse emissions are due to forest destruction, stablising greenhouse gas emissions requires reduction in the rate of deforestation.

In working through the maze of economic and scientific dilemmas at the UN climate change meeting, looking at the faces of the world's poor is not a bad way to start. In the past, solutions to ecological problems have often been directed to needs other than those of the people most directly affected.

Last week the Prime Minister’s Task Group on Emissions Trading released its report. Given that even Malcom Turnbull has described climate change as “the great economic challenge of our times”, the Report’s 200-plus pages are decidedly thin on substance.

Those of us who played school or local footy in our youth remember bitterly cold days, ankle-deep mud and finding it difficult to tell team mates from opposition through the layers of mud caked on jumpers. My twelve year old has already played for more than five years, but has not experienced one of those afternoons.

It came to light at the Vatican's recent Climate Change Seminar that powerful and vested interests are confusing farmers in developing countries. They are saying that technology will solve their agricultural problems, and that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is good and willed by God.

Opponents of nuclear power in Australia most often use environmental and economic arguments. The real problem with establishing a nuclear power industry is that it is a hugely complex and dangerous technology, and Australia has a poor record in safely managing even relatively simple technologies.

Symbolic gestures, whether at personal or at national level, are effective, even though they will have a barely measurable effect on water supply or global warming. Our world becomes different, and our sense of what has priority in it also changes.

While the climate change debate has largely focused on how a levy might hurt the economy, the St Vincent de Paul Society has raised concerns about the financial impact on households on low incomes or living in disadvantaged communities.